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Imaginaries of a Vision

2020; Duke University Press; Volume: 7; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/23289252-7914598

2328-9260

Sayan Bhattacharya,

African Sexualities and LGBTQ+ Issues

Gayatri Gopinath's first book, Impossible Desires, published under the Perverse Modernities series of Duke University Press, has become a foundational text in the fields of queer and feminist studies since its publication in 2005. In Impossible Desires, Gopinath problematized the masculinist and heteronormative foundations of studies of the diaspora and its relationship to the nation-state by eloquently demonstrating how these formations cohere around constructions of normative genders and sexualities. Carefully reading queer diasporic bodies and desires, Gopinath conjured not an idyllic homeland of origin frozen in time but multiple and shifting accounts of memory, homeland, exiles, and displacements that were at once an account of colonialism and racism as they were accounts of life making that often exceeded the strictures of heteronormativity.Gopinath's new book, Unruly Visions, published under the same series, is a continuation of her first book, in its accounts of queerness, nation-state, and the diaspora. However, Unruly Visions is not focused simply on the South Asian diaspora. Gopinath curates a wide array of films and images by artists responding to settler colonialism, post-9/11 security states, racialized violence, occupation, wars, and pressures of heteronormativity. In carefully reading each artwork in its material context, including the artist's positionality, as well as alongside each other, Gopinath demonstrates how seemingly disparate histories of dispossession and violence are related to each other.The word curation is key here. Drawing from its root meaning “to care for,” curation is not simply an arrangement of art objects for Gopinath. By reading them together, Gopinath seeks to illuminate the affective charge of these texts, the intersubjective relationalities and affiliations that such a reading practice—through encounter between art objects emerging from seemingly disparate contexts—might engender. For her, such an act of reading is queer curation that archives, documents, and analyzes the ephemeral, the minor, the antimonumental, and the seemingly inconsequential and yet that helps one endure and even exceed the structural forms of violence that overdetermine the subjects of such art practices. This is what Gopinath calls the aesthetics of the queer diaspora that mobilizes “new ways of seeing” (5) and relating.In mobilizing new ways of seeing, theorizations of the region, both in its subnational and supranational sense, become important for Gopinath. Regions are not simply stable geographic categories. They are also riven by global flows of capital, technologies, and bodies and are relational. In one of the most powerful sections of the book, Gopinath turns to the autobiographical by narrating how Kerala, as depicted in the film Sancharram (dir. Ligy Pullappally, 2004), powerfully hails her, given her own ancestral connection to this southern Indian state. However, nostalgia does not freeze the past. Gopinath offers us a complex reading of how the film simultaneously freezes Kerala as backward but also engenders possibilities for nonnormative intimacies that thwart the heteronormative projects of the nation-state. By staging an encounter between the diaspora and the region, Gopinath undermines the centrality of the nation-state in studies of the diaspora.Gopinath's theorization of the region offers transgender studies a new analytic to meet the challenge of undoing its US exceptionalism. In the TSQ special issue titled “Decolonizing the Transgender Imaginary,” the editors and contributing authors powerfully articulated the need to interrogate the whiteness of the field as a settler-colonial practice and its imposition of US-based categories on other locations (Aizura et al. 2014). However, it is not adequate to offer a cultural account of nonnormative genders in various nation-states because such accounts remain case studies for US-based transgender studies to theorize. Gopinath's reading of regions offers a method to draw connections between multiple regions in the way they disrupt and get folded within nation-states. Thus region is not simply a case study but also an intricate theorization of power in the way it shapes identities.For Gopinath, queerness is a mode of reading that allows her to “apprehend” the intimacies of multiple historical formations like indigeneity, racialization, colonization, multiple temporalities, and geographies. It is surprising in such a caring and relational reading of historical formations that Gopinath omits discussions of caste. While Gopinath does offer us an astute reading of Sancharram, this analysis could be drawn out further to analyze how race, caste, and indigeneity could be studied together in theorizing the region, the diaspora, and the nation-state. For example, in her reading of the same film, Navaneetha Mokkil (2009) argues that the Nairs, a dominant caste in Kerala, have consolidated their caste hegemony in the region by invoking a military past and training in the martial arts. When Kiran, a Nair girl and one of the protagonists of the film, declares her love for Delilah, the Christian girl, her mother disapproves, but Kiran hails the military past of the Nairs and says that she is a warrior too and thus refuses to settle for a compromise marriage (24). At the end of the film, we see that even as Delilah succumbs to the pressures of compulsory heterosexuality, Kiran walks into the world, perhaps crossing the borders of the region to fully own her lesbian identity elsewhere. In other words, a close study of caste helps us analyze how sexuality, mobility, and freedom are all overdetermined by it. The film ends up folding the Nair caste in the developmental time of queer identity and rights by otherizing the noncaste Hindu as backward.1Queerness also helps Gopinath apprehend the gendered and sexual subjectifications through which racialized and colonized populations are produced as nonnormative as well as how these groups of people exceed those very subjectifications (14). We may ask, however, is queerness so capacious that it is able to account for all the various ways in which it is deployed? In a field-defining essay titled “What's Queer about Queer Studies Now?,” David Eng, Judith (Jack) Halberstam, and José Esteban Muñoz (2005: 1) warned that queer studies needs to be vigilant to “the fact that sexuality is intersectional, not extraneous to other modes of difference, and calibrated to a firm understanding of queer as a political metaphor without a fixed referent.” Queer cannot remain moored to sexual identity alone at a time when immigrant communities are being labeled terrorists, when racialized populations are being criminalized in the name of national security. They argued that it is precisely to keep its political charge alive that queer critique must be subjectless, that is, without a fixed referent. Queer studies must critique any positivist impulse of identity and instead must deconstruct anything deemed “normal” as a site of social violence, and that site of social violence is not just gender and sexuality. However, this refusal of any referent has meant that queer is perhaps infinitely adaptable and mobile. It follows where political urgency calls.How does queer become infinitely mobile? Aren Aizura (2018) examines the many genealogies of mobility in his book, Mobile Subjects. Mobility is not simply a geographical movement or movement between different spaces. It is also the ability to transcend one's class position (17–18). In times of global refugee crisis, how do we think of mobility, which could mean assimilation into normative frameworks of rights and citizenship for some and stuckness, rightlessness, and perpetual waiting for others? Yet is there no movement in being stuck? Can queer studies think of mobility without accounting for whose movement at what cost? Kadji Amin (2017: 182) argues that the mobility of queer studies is both a disciplinary norm and a front. Mobility is a disciplinary norm or a compulsion because queer studies can remain so only if it is without a fixed referent. The field is thus paradoxically defined by its indefinition. However, this mobility is also a front because queer's mobility allows it to escape historicization and even accountability to subjects it writes about. Mobility allows queer studies to constantly race for the next cutting-edge and radical issue for intervention and theorization, which is a front because the race for the next big disruptive project also allows queer studies to consolidate academic capital without sufficiently interrogating the institutionalization of the field. Yet this interrogation is urgent, given that queer studies is a field that commands academic publications, tenure-track jobs, and conferences. It is not simply an activist stance anymore. Amin (2017: 182) trenchantly asks, “Might Queer Studies resist the demand that it constantly sell a new product that satisfyingly reproduces the cutting-edge cachet of its founding moment, as well as the implication that to fail to do so is to be, simply, dead? ‘What's queer about Queer Studies now?’ we hear . . . and now? . . . and now?” I would argue that Gopinath's reading of the film Mosquita y Mari (dir. Aurora Guerrero, 2012) is an eloquent response to Amin's and Aizura's provocations. Mosquita and Mari are young Chicanas living in the working-class, Latinx enclave of Huntington Park in Los Angeles. Gopinath provides us a detailed reading of how Guerrero films the daily, the mundane, and the routine. Nothing much happens in the film. Yet there is beauty and poetry in the moments. That Mari is undocumented situates her in a state of suspension; that is, normative pathways to success are not available to her. However, Gopinath writes: “Queerness allows for an alternative form of suspension that resists the forward and upward directionality of normative visions of aspirational success. Unlike the stuck or stalled temporality that marks the state of being undocumented, queerness offers another pathway through precarity, one that may be contingent, momentary and tentative, but that nevertheless opens up a different vista of what constitutes success and ‘making it’” (82). At the Latinx enclave the smell of chemicals signal the environmental degradation, the brunt of which is borne mostly by immigrant communities of color but it is enmeshed with the smell of pan dulce, signaling the rich socialities woven by those very communities out of the nation-state's developmental time. Mari and Mosquita's romantic-erotic friendship thrives here amid this stuckness, what Gopinath calls “circuits of sideways movement,” through the sharing of moments, objects, dreams, ice cream, and joints (81). Indeed, Gopinath's theorization of motion in stuckness is politically urgent in carefully tracking modes of survivance under neocolonial duress.This also raises questions about how queer theory assembles its objects. For example, Gopinath reads Chitra Ganesh's reconstituted family photograph album, 13 Photos (2009) as a disorienting device—the indeterminate picturesque landscapes that demand we stay with the uncomfortable question of whether it is Kashmir, forever stuck between India and Pakistan's brutal nationalist aspirations and the lone figure of the woman who almost blends into the landscape, disrupting the couple form exemplified by honeymoon images. The empty, picturesque landscape is unknowable and unlocatable, and it is in this space of uncomfortable indeterminacy that Gopinath reads Kashmir as a zone of queerness. She writes that when she presented an iteration of this reading, a Kashmiri scholar pointed out to her that what she was reading as unknowable might be recognizable by a displaced Kashmiri. Every lake and mountain range in Ganesh's images might, after all, bring home the pain of a Kashmiri exiled from those very locations in Kashmir. Gopinath turns to Agha Shahid Ali's poetry to respond to such a question about home and dislocation. The idea of home is multiply mediated through varied representations. Even an actual return to what was once home might not return one to one's memory of home. In that sense, a return is impossible, and hence the indeterminacy of the landscapes in 13 Photos gestures to that impossibility. Such an impossibility does not eschew the material violence of occupation and displacement but asks us to imagine what political possibilities might be engendered by dwelling in that indeterminacy. Yet how do we think of such indeterminacy when we think of those stuck within the occupation, those who are enduring the spectacular and daily forms of institutionalized violence? What would it mean to imagine a Mosquita or Mari in Kashmir? Ali's location in the United States also allows his poetry a form of transnational circulation, notably in the American academia, that many artists located within Kashmir do not have. This is not at all about any kind of authenticity of experience but to question what mobility affords.In filmmaker Vishal Bharadwaj's adaptation of Hamlet, titled Haider (2014), based on a screenplay cowritten with Kashmiri journalist and writer Basharat Peer, a Kashmiri man gets stuck at the threshold of his home. His wife implores him to enter, but he cannot budge. Roohdar, based on Hamlet's ghost, observes the scene and comes forward and conducts a mock search on the man and asks for his identity card nonchalantly. It is only after the search is completed that the man enters his home. Roohdar comments that the man has post-traumatic stress disorder, driving home the point of what it means to dwell in one of the world's largest militarized zones. How do we think of Ganesh's frames in conjunction with Haider? What accounts of life making might such an encounter signal? What happens when return is impossible not because one is in exile but because one is in the heart of one's home? This question is more urgent than ever as the Indian state has clamped down on all essential services in Kashmir since August 5, 2019—internet, mobile phones, hospitals, cooking supplies—and has revoked even the very little autonomy the occupied state had under the Indian Constitution. At the time of writing this essay, this blockade is yet to be lifted.An unruly vision goes wayward, and in doing so Gopinath gives us a breathtaking archive of moments and visuals that are what perhaps Saidiya Hartman (2018: 467) calls “revolution in the minor key.” However how do we account for those outside the field of such a vision, those recalcitrant objects that cannot or refuse to take flight?My thanks to Saptarshi Mandal for reading this piece and directing me to Unruly Figures.